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Joining The Dots

I have now published my new book, Joining The Dots, which offers a fresh look at the Atlantis mystery. I have addressed the critical questions of when, where and who, using Plato's own words, tempered with some critical thinking and a modicum of common sense.

SergioFrau was born in 1949 and is a journalist with Italy’s leading daily newspaper La Repubblica. He is also the author of a hefty 672 page volume, Le Collone de Ercole: Un’inchiesta[302] that firmly places Atlantis in Sardinia and the Pillars of Hercules in the Strait of Sicily between Tunisia and Sicily. He supports this contention with references to ancient writers such as Herodotus and Dicaearchus.

Frau contends that a catastrophic inundation of some sort destroyed the mysterious ancient civilisation on Sardinia known as the Nuraghi, after whom the numerous ancient towers on the islands are named. A megatsunami around 1200 BC is accepted to have struck from the south. Frau believes that some of the survivors migrated to the Italian mainland and founded the Etruscan civilisation, while others formed part of the Sea Peoples who attacked Egypt.

His book sold over 30,000 copies in Italy, his theory received favourable attention from UNESCO and an exhibition based on his work has been shown in Paris and Rome. This is in sharp contrast to the 250 historians who reportedly denounced his theory. Then there are many others, such as Hannah Fielding, the novelist, who is very attracted to Frau’s ideas(b).

Frau has received support for his theory from the well-known geologist, Mario Tozzi. Another commentator, Silvio Diego Novo has also given his backing to the idea(b).

Robert Ishoy proposed a similar theory(a) on the Internet at least two years before Frau had his book published. However, the earliest claim that Atlantis had existed on Sardinia was made in 1982 by Paolo Valente Poddighe, who now accuses Frau of plagiarism.

Although the media have generally given a positive response to Frau’s book, Thorwald C. Franke has panned it, denouncing it as pseudo-science(d), but reluctantly conceded that Frau “could nevertheless be partially right! For the record, I agree with Franke’s limited support.

In addition to which, 71 Sardinian archaeologists, geologists and historians have signed a 21-point refutation of Frau’s theory(e).

So far Frau’s book is only available in Italian and German(c).*In 2017, Frau published a sequel to his Le Collone de Ercole, entitled Omphalos[1553] in which he expands on aspects of his Sardinian location for Atlantis in a hefty 1154-page volume, which once again is currently only available in Italian.*

In August 2016, Frau received another round of publicity following an interview with Sputnik news media(f). The interview added nothing of consequence, although the text was copied by other media outlets. Nevertheless, this did not hold back Jason Colavito from his standard atlantiphobic attack(g).

The Baltic Sea however improbable at first sight as a candidate for the location of Atlantis has a number of features that cannot be ignored. The area was subjected to post-glacial inundations following the last Ice Age. Tacitus, the respected Roman historian placed the Pillars of Hercules or at least one set of them, in the Baltic.

It was reported by Konrad Kretschmer towards the end of the 19th century that another German writer only referred to as Hafer proposed in 1745 that Atlantis had been located in the Baltic with its capital situated on the island of Rugen.

Jürgen Spanuth based his Atlantis theory on an unambiguous identification of the Atlanteans with the Hyperboreans of the Baltic region. His map of the Atlantean Empire is shown on the right. The German writer Doris Manner attempted to identify the legendary Baltic city of Vineta with Atlantis.

The Italian writer Felice Vinci has recently offered[0018,0019] compelling arguments that support his contention that much of Greek mythology has its roots in northern Europe. He focuses on the epic poems, IIliad and Odysseus, attributed to Homer, to demonstrate a Baltic origin for the stories. Vinci suggests that the Atlantis story should also be reviewed in the light of his own research. He also offers some interesting views on the size of Atlantis.

Spanuth’s views on the subject of Nordic influences on Greek poets and writers, are also worth a read[017.163].

Perhaps the strongest argument against the Baltic Hypothesis is geological when Plato records that some time after the war both Athens and Atlantis suffered catastrophic destruction as a consequence of a powerful earthquake and floods. Unlike the Aegean, the Baltic was not noted for earthquakes and they lie over 1,200 miles from each other. It is unknown for an earthquake to simultaneously cause even minor damage at two locations so far apart and would appear to be impossible when one of them is seismically stable.

The British Daily Mail of Jan. 27th, 2014 reported(a) that Swedish divers had discovered the remains of a 11,000-year-old settlement under the Baltic at Hano, off the coast of Skane County, which was quickly labelled ‘Sweden’s Atlantis’!

Cádiz is the modern name for ancient Gades considered the original kingdom of Gadeirus the twin brother of Atlas. However, the certainty normally associated with this accepted identification is weakened by the fact that quite a number of locations with similar sounding names are to be found in the Central and Western Mediterranean region.

The Spanish historian, Adolfo Valencia wrote a history of Cádiz[0208], in which he suggested that Atlantis might have extended all the way from Cádiz to Malta.

It is generally accepted that the Phoenicians from Tyre founded Gadir, later to be known as Gades to the Romans. The Roman historian, Velleius Paterculus (c.19 BC – c.31 AD) wrote that Cadiz was founded 80 years after the Trojan War, circa 1100 BC. In the 9th century BC, the Phoenicians, under Princess Dido, founded a new capital at Carthage in North Africa. At Gades the Phoenicians/Carthaginians built a temple to Melqart that had two columns that many consider to be the original Pillars of Hercules. In 2007, it was announced that excavations in the old town centre produced shards of Phoenician pottery and walls dated to the 8th century BC, probably making it the oldest inhabited city in Europe.

Greenland was first proposed as the location of Atlantis in the 17th century by François de la Mothe le Vayer. More recently some of the more imaginative writers have tried, unsuccessfully, to revive interest in this idea. One of these is the American, Dale Huffman, who claims that the outline of Greenland is comparable with Kircher‘s famous map of Atlantis. He has also proposed that while Atlantis was primarily Greenland it also included “the islands of the United Kingdom and Iceland”(h).(see left)

Another proponent is Mario Dantas who is equally determined to link Plato’s description with the enormous island of Greenland(a) and has submitted a paper on the subject to the 2008 Atlantis Conference in Athens.

Another site(b) advocates the Baffin Basin just west of Greenland, as the Great Plain of Atlantis. This idea developed by a New Zealander, Ian Fox, is based on a re-interpretation of Plato’s text combined with the studies of Charles Hapgood.

In 2014, Antonio Usai published an English translation of his 2011 booklet on the Pillars of Hercules[980] in which he places the original ‘Pillars’ at the Tunisian island of Kerkennah and then unexpectedly proposed that Atlantis was situated at Greenland.

Another proponent of the Greenland location is Stefan Grossmann in his book, Atlantlantean(sic) Philosophy(d), a commentary on the non-existent ‘Emerald Tablets of Thoth’(e), concocted by Maurice Doreal (Claude Doggins).

In October 2011 a team of researchers from the Laboratory of Geology in Lyon may have elevated the importance of Greenland to an even higher level with their claim(c) that life on earth may have originated there 3.8 billion years ago.

In 2013, Lucio Russo, an Italian mathematician and science historian, located Thule on the coast of Greenland, having identified errors in Ptolemy’s geographical calculations[1060].

In 2014 Antonio Moreno Checa published La Atlántida. El mito hecho realidad (Atlantis. The myth comes true)[1063] in which he also locates Atlantis in Greenland. Gennaro Anziano, an Italian writer, has also located Atlantis in Greenland(g) in his 2001 book, Atlantis – Discover the land of the gods[1072].

Marco Goti published The Island of Plato[1430] in 2017 and offered another failed attempt at identifying Greenland as Atlantis.

Leaving aside any suggested connection with Atlantis, there are other features of the vast island that deserve attention. There are a number of raised beaches which clearly indicate that “the whole of this large island has been raised, or the sea has sunk, in post-glacial times” and that “the upheaval has been greater in the north”. Their height above sea level varies from 325 and 480 feet!